ART: ROTHENBERG HORSES AT THE GAGOSIAN GALLERY

By MICHAEL BRENSON

Published: January 23, 1987

IT is more than a decade now since Susan Rothenberg's horses began appearing in galleries and museums. They were peculiar creatures. They looked like horses, but they were invariably flat, featureless and tailless, and they stood and rocked in dense, nondescript spaces. There was nothing romantic about them, but they were not anti-romantic either, and here and there they nodded in the direction of their illustrious ancestors. The nerve and conviction of these paintings became signposts for a generation.

''Susan Rothenberg, The Horse Paintings: 1974-1980,'' at the Gagosian Gallery, 521 West 23d Street, through Feb. 28, is not comprehensive. There are eight paintings in the show; there are roughly 50 horse paintings in all. Nor is it the best selection; the exhibition was determined by availability. Nor is it an attempt to identify the artist with the Gagosian Gallery; the show was planned well before the Willard Gallery, which has represented the artist for years, announced that it would close in June.

Four of the paintings are essentially black and white; four are black and terra cotta. The 1974 ''Triphammer Bridge,'' with its two-legged black horse as flat as a donkey on a wall waiting for a blindfolded kid with a pin and tail, may have been the first horse painting Rothenberg did. The 1980 ''Tuning Fork,'' in which the horse is frontal and the painting more polychromatic, was one of the last, before she devoted herself to the disembodied heads and the body parts that have the persistence of memory and the elusiveness of dreams.

The show suggests just how organic Rothenberg's development has been. The body shapes hovering in her early 80's paintings seem to have emerged almost by themselves from the paintings of the previous years. They are suggested in the negative areas between or around horse's legs, or in patterns of brushstrokes that seem to have come and gone as Rothenberg sought to anchor image to ground. Her ability to listen to her work, no matter how disconcerting and provocative the voices might be, helps explain its urgency.

Within a pictorial arena that is almost Minimalist in its simplicity, there are several elemental struggles. One is defined in terms of figure and ground. The effort to get the image of this wild animal to remain still without the help of pictorial anchors led to a close exploration of contours and edges. The horse paintings, and perhaps all of Rothenberg's works, have a great deal to do with fitting, and fitting in. When the image is located in space, it seems at home in nothingness.

There is a continuing struggle between movement and immobility. By painting horses in profile, Rothenberg suggests their potential for movement. But by flattening them, she also stops or freezes movement and makes the image seem in some way frontal. In two paintings, a horse is squeezed into the outline of a geometrical form. In ''Black in Place,'' the form is a triangle; in ''Kelpie'' it is round like a head. In each painting, the horse seems both wild and tamed, both itching to bolt and about to lurch forward like a piece of porcelain.

The horse paintings can also be approached through the relationship between line and color, or between the spareness of the imagery and lushness of the paint. It is also important that Rothenberg's expressionist brushwork was applied with infinite patience. Sometimes there is a sense that a horse has been placed in the canvas and then used as a source whose energy and will the artist taps again and again until they become part of the painting and the horse becomes little more than a carcass. Rothenberg's horse paintings are moving and disturbing, and they will not be easily exhausted. Also of interest this week: Lothar Baumgarten (Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street): This installation is based on the 15 months the West German Conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten spent living with Indians in the Upper Orinoco Basin, in southern Venezuela, in 1978 and 1979. There were about 85 people in this particular community, which at that time had had relatively little contact with the outside world. The moment on which the show focuses is the return from an extended hunting trip, when the backs of the Indians were laden with the fruit of their labors, and the community was particularly vulnerable to attack.

Baumgarten is concerned with difference. This work is an attempt to find an artistic form that will allow him to express not himself and his feelings about the Indians, nor the particularity of the Indians and the texture of their lives. What interests him is the space between him and them, between culture and nature, and between our civilization and theirs. By making an installation that can function as that space, he hopes to encourage a new tolerance and awareness of the ''other.''

Most of the gallery walls are sponged with red made from the onoto seed used by the Indians to paint their bodies. Since some of the white walls of the gallery are untouched, white is placed within a red context. There are 13 photographs on the walls. They seem spontaneous, taken in transit; some are washed out and out of focus. Baumgarten wanted to avoid any sense that the Indians were specimens, or that they were in any way ''captured'' by the camera.

Also on the walls, sometimes covering part of the photographs, never directly corresponding with the images, are texts. They may make a distanced political statement: ''the dwelling of our advantages are others' chains.'' They may both challenge and reinforce distance: ''eating fruit from the warm throat of a killed bird.'' The texts are mounted on charcoal lines that look like frames in photo albums, or bars of cages. There are also strips of black paper covering one entire photograph and parts of others and suggesting the partialness of any outside perspective.

The great strength of the work is that it does create a space between us and the Indians that is filled with air. The weakness is that it remains schematic. It is so concerned with relieving weight, with denying the possibility of our and the artist's own projection and identification, and with defining an in-between that it can only make its point and then stop.

Would it be possible to focus attention on difference while at the same time drawing attention to the artist's particular and passionate involvement in Indian life, and to the particularity of the people? Would it be possible to build into work that wants to create fresh possibility a sharp sense of the violence that can result from the fear and romanticizing of the ''other''? And what about the awareness that recognizing the ''other'' is not only a political problem, but also a human and perhaps a metaphysical problem that can rear up whenever any two people, anywhere, get together? (Through Feb. 7.) Dennis Adams - Building Against Image 1979-1987 (Alternative Museum, 17 White Street): Dennis Adams is concerned with the mass media as a force that destroys and creates meaning; with the way advertising is used in public places as a commercial and ideological tool, and with the shapes of places like movie theaters and kiosks and their potential for communication. His work is experimental and filled with ideas, but it is also filled with questions, particularly about the effectiveness of the public pieces with which he is increasingly concerned.

In the 1979 ''American Eulogy (BJZ),'' he appropriated 26 different photographs of Patti Hearst and assigned to each of them a letter of the alphabet. Then he organized the photograph-letters into a statement that covers an entire wall and forms an inverted pyramid. The orderly, yet disequilibrated work creates the sense both of a profusion of meaning and of emptiness. For some writers, this combination of utter void and bottomless production has been the American story.

In his bus shelters, which remain more challenging in theory than in practice, Adams is determined to beat advertising at its own game. He devises actual shelters that are defined by a disjunctive relationship between words and images, form and function. The goal is not to lead the public through advertising's process of initiating desire and promising satisfaction, but rather to stop desire, promise nothing and question how public sites are used.

One of Adams's strengths is his use of materials and color. His blank aluminum panels suggest memory; his black structures suggest the violation of it. In ''Street Vendor's Kiosk With Image of Donald Trump,'' a large aluminum panel seems to have been inserted through two photopanels of Donald Trump into a devouring black kiosk. Once the kiosk digests the panel, we are left with objects like war toys and cheap transistor radios in which memory has been turned into disfigured, commercial products. Here, too, the idea is compelling, but something important gets lost as the work evolves from stages in which the artist is clearly present to the finished public piece, from which he seems absent. (Through Feb. 21.)